Like A Breathing Tadpole!
I used to think I was a tadpole, mother, I used to think I was swaddled in a too hot blanket and I shivered and shook, propelling my body through the sweat and water to the shore
where I suffocated until I opened my eyes and could see my own chest, rising, falling, like a tadpole, mother, like a breathing tadpole!
I tried to resist imposing order on the universe by instead allowing it all to wash over me as a cold good current, my back on the rounded rocks, my hair sliding away,
my face just below the surface, my lips just above. Are you proud of me, tadpole mother, did you see me grow my legs?
Did they blossom like ripe fruit? Like bursting time between blossom and fruit? Like a fat tadpole who burst, mother, at its own unhappy and fated seams?
Both of us on our bellies, both of us floating in space, both of us with both eyes and two feet and not much else calculable besides the breath that fills our little lungs — two breathing tadpoles!
A quiet but not silent miracle, two bodies ready to burst full of arms and legs and vestigial tails and so many hopeful eggs warm from all the crowded limbs inside their thin walls inside us.
I don’t remember everything but what I do is in technicolor — the way my mother held me with two hands, the way my two small hands gripped her shoulders as I rode on her back,
how she jumped with strong legs from ragged wet outcropping to cool reeded corner, when my brothers and sisters and I crowded around the opening of a hot spring, our tails retracting
at the same rate as our legs grow long, and I wondered what other precious parts of myself I may lose as warm bubbles break like eggs around us —